Sides prepare for a pricey high court campaign

WASHINGTON -- Many are calling it the ''presidential election of 2005," a fund-raising effort to wage a White House-style campaign for and against President Bush's pending Supreme Court nominee.

Liberal and conservative groups, fired up for an unprecedented clash over deeply felt social issues such as abortion rights, set contours yesterday for a fund-raising effort that could dwarf almost all past political campaigns except those involving the presidency.

So many groups will be participating in the campaign, specialists said, that it will be difficult to predict how much money will be spent on TV ads, direct mail, and phone banks.

And unlike in a presidential campaign, almost all of the money will be spent by independent advocacy groups, most of which are not required, under federal tax law, to reveal its source.

''I'm not sure we're ever really going to know" how much is spent, said Jesse Rutledge, executive director of Justice At Stake, a nonpartisan group that seeks to remove politics from judiciary selections. ''We may not get a lot in the way of disclosure or spending patterns."

As of yesterday, dozens of groups were invoking the Supreme Court opening to fill their coffers.

The conservative activist Gary Bauer sent an e-mail message to 125,000 followers asking for money to counter liberals who ''have made it clear that they will fight any pro-family nominee tooth and nail." Progress for America, another conservative group, has pledged to raise $18 million.

And Focus on the Family, led by Dr. James Dobson, the evangelist and author of books on child-rearing, is also accumulating cash for an advertising campaign backing a conservative nominee.

''So many Americans have given sweat, toil and tears to elect a conservative president and a conservative Senate majority for precisely this moment," Bauer wrote in a pitch for credit-card donations on his website.

The liberal group People for the American Way yesterday solicited money from donors around the country from the ''war room" that it equipped with 75 phone lines and 40 computers for a Supreme Court fight. Having spent $5 million opposing Republican efforts to change Senate rules to prevent Democrats from blocking judicial nominees, the group is building a giant war chest of its own, including a chain-mail approach asking recipients both to donate and to pass the message onto 10 friends.

''The Supreme Court battle is here," the People for the American Way pitch said. ''We don't know who the nominee will be right now, but we do know that we will need the time, energy, and resources of tens of thousands of Americans to prevent that nominee's Senate confirmation if she or he is so extreme as to warrant opposition."

The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said yesterday that President Bush has taken dossiers on a half-dozen potential nominees with him during his European trip, and that it will be several weeks before he is ready to announce a nominee.

But liberal and conservative groups are running ads. Once the nominee is announced, both sides plan to target their TV spots at states with senators who are thought to be vulnerable to political pressure, creating a ''swing-state" dynamic similar to that in the presidential campaign last year.

''Our key focus is red states which have blue senators," said Wendy Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, a conservative group, referring to Democrats in states that supported Bush in last year's race.

With so many political leaders and activists girding for a fight -- and stirring up the grass roots with doomsday predictions of what might happen if the other side wins the battle -- some observers worry that a bitter clash might become unavoidable, no matter whom Bush nominates.

''There's no backing off," said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida. ''This is the culmination of an increasingly deep ideological divide that is being fueled by these groups. . . . If you look back at the 2004 election, a lot of the direct mail pieces going out to each side had court issues in them, so this is really just an extension of that."

However, some liberals, including the Alliance for Justice president, Nan Aron, say they are still hoping to avoid a fight by pressuring the White House to choose a politically moderate justice to replace Sandra Day O'Connor.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said yesterday that he would have 30,000 signatures by next week on a petition to Bush to choose a moderate justice, and the liberal group Moveon.org has a similar campaign, with a goal of 300,000 signatures.

Most liberals are pessimistic about their chances of influencing Bush's pick. And some conservatives, taking note of the liberal embrace of O'Connor, are already hoping they can turn it to their advantage, said Manuel Miranda, head of the conservative judicial nomination umbrella group Third Branch Conference and a former judicial nominations adivsor to the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee.

At a 70-group conference call yesterday, Miranda said, members discussed using liberals' acceptance of O'Connor against them. The groups plan to cite O'Connor's conservative positions on many issues, such as her strong defense of property rights, to make the case that she was always a conservative justice.

Then, if liberals assert that Bush's nominee is out of the mainstream, they will simply point to all the similarities between that person and O'Connor.

''We talked about O'Connor and the fact that the left has attempted to seize her as an icon," Miranda said. ''The moment will come where there is a nominee and their words will be used against them."

Meanwhile, MoveOn.com members will participate in more than a thousand ''house meetings" this weekend, when they will set up local strategies to pressure senators, said Ben Brandzel, MoveOn.com's advocacy director. Brandzel said he didn't have a target amount of money to raise, but noted that the group was able to pull in $1.5 million for recent battles over appeals court nominees.

''Imagine what we're going to be able to unleash if Bush . . . replaces O'Connor with an extremist," Brandzel said.

Other groups aren't planning expensive media campaigns, but say they are organizing for a fight. Paul Schenck, executive director of the National Pro-Life Action Center, said his members have been communicating with Christian clergy.

''This will be the topic in the pulpit as well as among the people," he said.

On Capitol Hill, Senate Judiciary Committee staff members said they expected the confirmation process to take about 70 days after a nomination; this would include committee hearings and debate. Leaders from both parties are scheduled to meet with Bush on July 11 to discuss nominees.

The epicenter of the selection process is the office of White House Counsel Harriet Miers, with help from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy. That office is under the oversight of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who is himself a potential nominee. Gonzales who would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice in US history.

Gonzales drew fire this weekend from social conservatives who fear he is soft on abortion.

Their warnings to the White House not to name Gonzales earned a rebuke from Bush in an interview published yesterday.

''Al Gonzales is a great friend of mine," USA Today quoted Bush as saying. ''I'm the kind of person, when a friend gets attacked, I don't like it."

Miranda said some conservative activists worried aloud yesterday that they may have inadvertantly goaded Bush into naming Gonzales through their attacks, although Miranda said he believed two other Hispanics with firmer social conservative credentials -- Cuban-born Danny Boggs and Emilio Garza, both federal appeals judges -- were more likely choices.

Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, ''is well-attuned to the political ramifications of this," Miranda said. ''He knows that Gonzales would divide the Republican base, whereas another Hispanic would unite the Republican base and divide the Democrats tremendously."

With both Republicans and Democrats already strategizing for political gain, Bill Leuchtenberg, a retired professor at the University of North Carolina who testified against Judge Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination in 1987, predicted that the coming fight will be the ugliest in history.

''There is a deep ideological commitment here. It's almost like a religious war, with a sense of so much at stake," Leuchtenberg said.